Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2: Sharpe’s Havoc, Sharpe’s Eagle, Sharpe’s Gold (33 page)

“We?” Sharpe asked. “You’re coming too?”

“This is far too important to be left to some lowly English lieutenant,” Hogan said. “This is an errand that needs the sagacity of the Irish.”

Once in the schoolhouse, Sharpe and Hogan settled in the kitchen where the French occupiers of the city had left an undamaged table and, because Hogan had left his good map at the General’s headquarters, he used a piece of charcoal to draw a cruder version on the table’s scrubbed top. From the main schoolroom, where Sharpe’s men had spread their blankets, came the sound of women’s laughter. His men, Sharpe reflected, had been in the city less than a day yet they had already found a dozen girls. “Best way to learn the language, sir,” Harper had assured him, “and we’re all very short on education, sir, as you doubtless know.”

“Right!” Hogan kicked the kitchen door shut. “Look at the map, Richard.” He showed how the British had come up the coast of Portugal and dislodged the French from Oporto and how, at the same time, the Portuguese army had attacked in the east. “They’ve retaken Amarante,” Hogan said, “which is good because it means Soult can’t cross that bridge. He’s stuck, Richard, stuck, so he’s got no choice. He’ll have to strike north through the hills to find a wee road up here”—the charcoal
scratched as he traced a wiggly line on the table—“and it’s a bastard of a road, and if the Portuguese can keep going in this God-awful weather then they’re going to cut the road here.” The charcoal made a cross. “It’s a bridge called Ponte Nova. Do you remember it?”

Sharpe shook his head. He had seen so many bridges and mountain roads with Hogan that he could no longer remember which was which.

“The Ponte Nova,” Hogan said, “means the new bridge and naturally it’s as old as the hills and one tub of powder will send it crashing down into the gorge and then, Richard, Monsieur Soult is properly buggered. But he’s only buggered if the Portuguese can get there.” He looked gloomy, for the weather was not propitious for a swift march into the mountains. “And if they can’t stop Soult at the Ponte Nova then there’s a half-chance they’ll catch him at the Saltador. You remember that, of course?”

“I do remember that, sir,” Sharpe said.

The Saltador was a bridge high in the mountains, a stone span that leaped across a deep and narrow gorge, and the spectacular arch had been nicknamed the Leaper, the Saltador. Sharpe remembered Hogan mapping it, remembered a small village of low stone houses, but chiefly remembered the river tumbling in a seething torrent beneath the soaring bridge.

“If they get to the Saltador and cross it,” Hogan said, “then we can kiss them goodbye and wish them luck. They’ll have escaped.” He flinched as a crash of thunder reminded him of the weather. “Ah, well,” he sighed, “we can only do our best.”

“And just what are we doing?” Sharpe wanted to know.

“Now that, Richard, is a very good question,” Hogan said. He helped himself to a pinch of snuff, paused, then sneezed violently. “God help me, but the doctors say it clears the bronchial tubes, whatever the hell they are. Now, as I see it, one of two things can happen.” He tapped the charcoal streak marking the Ponte Nova. “If the French are stopped at that bridge then most will surrender, they’ll have no choice. Some will take to the hills, of course, but they’ll find armed peasants all over the
place looking for throats and other parts to cut. So we’ll either find Mister Christopher with the army when it surrenders or more likely he’ll run away and claim to be an escaped English prisoner. In which case we go into the mountains, find him and put him up against a wall.”

“Truly?”

“That worries you?”

“I’d rather hang him.”

“Ah, well, we can discuss the method when the time comes. Now the second thing that might happen, Richard, is that the French are not stopped at the Ponte Nova, in which case we need to reach the Saltador.”

“Why?”

“Think what it was like, Richard,” Hogan said. “A deep ravine, steep slopes everywhere, the kind of place where a few riflemen could be very vicious. And if the French are crossing the bridge then we’ll see him and your Baker rifles will have to do the necessary.”

“We can get close enough?” Sharpe asked, trying to remember the terrain about the leaping bridge.

“There are cliffs, high bluffs. I’m sure you can get within two hundred paces.”

“That’ll do,” Sharpe said grimly.

“So one way or another we have to finish him,” Hogan said, leaning back. “He’s a traitor, Richard. He’s probably not as dangerous as he thinks he is, but if he gets to Paris then no doubt the monsewers will suck his brain dry and so learn a few things we’d rather they didn’t know. And if he got back to London he’s slippery enough to convince those fools that he was always working for their interests. So all things considered, Richard, I’d say he was better off dead.”

“And Kate?”

“We’re not going to shoot her,” Hogan said reprovingly.

“Back in March, sir,” Sharpe said, “you ordered me to rescue her. Does that order still stand?”

Hogan stared at the ceiling which was smoke-blackened and pierced with lethal-looking hooks. “In the short time I’ve known you, Richard,”
he said, “I’ve noticed you possess a lamentable tendency to put on shining armor and look for ladies to rescue. King Arthur, God rest his soul, would have loved you. He’d have had you fighting every evil knight in the forest. Is rescuing Kate Savage important? Not really. The main thing is to punish Mister Christopher and I fear that Miss Kate will have to take her chances.”

Sharpe looked down at the charcoal map. “How do we get to the Ponte Nova?”

“We walk, Richard, we walk. We cross the mountains and those tracks aren’t fit for horses. You’d spend half the time leading them, worrying about their feed, looking after their hooves and wishing you didn’t have them. Mules now, I’d saddle some mules and take them, but where will we find mules tonight? It’s either mules or shanks’s pony, but either way we can only take a few men, your best and your fittest, and we have to leave before dawn.”

“What do I do with the rest of my men?”

Hogan thought about it. “Major Potter could use them,” he suggested, “to help guard the prisoners here?”

“I don’t want to lose them back to Shorncliffe,” Sharpe said. He feared that the second battalion would be making inquiries about their lost riflemen. They might not care that Lieutenant Sharpe was missing, but the absence of several prime marksmen would definitely be regretted.

“My dear Richard,” Hogan said, “if you think Sir Arthur’s going to lose even a few good riflemen then you don’t know him half as well as you think. He’ll move hell and high water to keep you here. And you and I have to move like hell to get to Ponte Nova before anyone else.”

Sharpe grimaced. “The French have a day’s start on us.”

“No, they don’t. Like fools they went toward Amarante which means they didn’t know that the Portuguese had recaptured it. By now they’ll have discovered their predicament, but I doubt they’ll start north till dawn. If we hurry, we beat them.” He frowned, looking down at the map. “There’s only one real problem I can see, other than finding Mister Christopher when we get there.”

“A problem?”

“I can find my way to Ponte Nova from Braga,” Hogan said, “but what if the French are already on the Braga road? We’ll have to take to the hills and it’s wild country, Richard, an easy place to get lost. We need a guide and we need to find him fast.”

Sharpe grinned. “If you don’t mind traveling with a Portuguese officer who thinks he’s a philosopher and a poet then I think I know just the man.”

“I’m Irish,” Hogan said, “there’s nothing we love more than philosophy and poetry.”

“He’s a lawyer too.”

“If he gets us to Ponte Nova,” Hogan said, “then God will doubtless forgive him for that.”

The women’s laughter was loud, but it was time to end the party. It was time for a dozen of Sharpe’s best men to mend their boots and fill their cartridge boxes.

It was time for revenge.

K
ATE SAT IN A CORNER
of the carriage and wept. The carriage was going nowhere. It was not even a proper carriage, not half as comfortable as the Quinta’s fragile gig that had been abandoned in Oporto and nothing like as substantial as the one her mother had taken south across the river in March, and how Kate now wished she had gone with her mother, but instead she had been stricken by romance and certain that love’s fulfillment would bring her golden skies, clear horizons and endless joy.

Instead she was in a two-wheeled Oporto hackney with a leaking leather roof, cracked springs and a broken-down gelding between its shafts, and the carriage was going nowhere because the fleeing French army was stuck on the road to Amarante. Rain seethed on the roof, streaked the windows and dripped onto Kate’s lap and she did not care, she just hunched in the corner and wept.

The door was tugged open and Christopher put his head in. “There are going to be some bangs,” he told her, “but there’s no need to be alarmed.” He paused, decided he could not cope with her sobbing, so just closed the door. Then he jerked it open again. “They’re disabling the guns,” he explained, “that’s what the noise will be.”

Kate could not have cared less. She wondered what would become of
her, and the awfulness of her prospects was so frightening that she burst into fresh tears just as the first guns were fired muzzle to muzzle.

On the morning after the fall of Oporto Marshal Soult had been woken to the appalling news that the Portuguese army had retaken Amarante and that the only bridge by which he could carry his guns, limbers, caissons, wagons and carriages back to the French fortresses in Spain was therefore in enemy hands. One or two hotheads had suggested fighting their way across the River Tamega, but scouts reported that the Portuguese were occupying Amarante in force, that the bridge had been mined and had a dozen guns now dominating its roadway, that it would take a day of bitter and bloody fighting to get across and even then there would probably be no bridge left for the Portuguese would doubtless blow it. And Soult did not have a day. Sir Arthur Wellesley would be advancing from Oporto so that left him only one option, which was to abandon all the army’s wheeled transport, every wagon, every limber, every caisson, every carriage, every mobile forge and every gun. They would all have to be left behind and twenty thousand men, five thousand camp followers, four thousand horses and almost as many mules must do their best to scramble over the mountains.

But Soult was not going to leave the enemy good French guns to turn against him, and so the weapons were each loaded with four pounds of powder, were double-shotted and placed muzzle to muzzle. Gunners struggled to keep their portfires alight in the rain and then, on a word of command, touched the two reed fuses and the powder flashed down to the overcharged chambers, the guns fired into each other, leaped back in a wrenching explosion of smoke and flames and then were left with ripped, torn barrels. Some of the gunners were weeping as they destroyed their weapons while others just cursed as they used knives and bayonets to rip open the powder bags that were left to spoil in the rain.

The infantry were ordered to empty their packs and haversacks of everything except food and ammunition. Some officers ordered inspections and insisted their men throw away the plunder of the campaign. Cutlery, candlesticks, plate, all had to be abandoned by the roadside as
the army took to the hills. The horses, oxen and mules that hauled the guns, carriages and limbers were shot rather than be ceded to the enemy. The animals screamed and thrashed as they died. The wounded who could not walk were left in their wagons and given muskets so they could at least try to protect themselves against the Portuguese who would find them soon enough and then attempt to exact revenge on helpless men. Soult ordered the military chest, eleven great barrels of silver coins, put by the road so the men could help themselves to a handful apiece as they went past. The women hitched up their skirts, scooped up the coins, and walked with their men. The dragoons, hussars and chasseurs led their horses. Thousands of men and women were climbing into the barren hills, leaving behind wagons loaded with bottles of wine, with port, with crosses of gold stolen from churches and with ancestral paintings plundered from the walls of northern Portugal’s big houses. The French had thought they had conquered a country, that they were merely waiting for a few reinforcements to swell the ranks as they marched on Lisbon, and none understood why they were suddenly faced with disaster or why King Nicolas was leading them on a shambolic retreat through torrential rain.

“If you stay here,” Christopher told Kate, “you’ll be raped.”

“I’ve been raped,” she wept, “night after night!”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Kate!” Christopher, dressed in civilian clothes, was standing by the carriage’s open door with rain dripping from the point of his cocked hat. “I’m not leaving you here.” He reached in, took her by the wrist and, despite her screams and struggles, hauled her from the carriage. “Walk, damn you!” he snarled, and dragged her across the verge and up the slope. She had only been out of the carriage a few seconds and already her blue hussar uniform, which Christopher had insisted she wore, was soaked through. “This isn’t the end,” Christopher told her, his grip painful on her thin wrist. “The reinforcements never arrived, that’s all! But we’ll be back.”

Kate, despite her misery, was struck by the “we.” Did he mean the two of them? Or did he mean the French? “I want to go home,” she cried.

“Stop being tedious,” Christopher snapped, “and keep walking!” He
pulled her on. Her new leather-soled boots slipped on the path. “The French are going to win this war,” Christopher insisted. He was no longer certain of that, but when he weighed the balances of power in Europe he managed to convince himself that it was true.

“I want to go back to Oporto!” Kate sobbed.

“We can’t!”

“Why not?” She tried to pull away from him and though she could not loosen his grip she did manage to bring him to a halt. “Why not?” she asked.

“We just can’t,” he said, “now come on!” He tugged her into motion again, unwilling to tell her that he could not go back to Oporto because that damned man Sharpe was alive. Good Christ in his heaven, but the bastard was only an over-age lieutenant and one, he had now learned, who was up from the ranks, but Sharpe knew too much that was damning to Christopher and so the Colonel would need to find a safe haven from where, by the discreet methods that he knew so well, he could send a letter to London. Then, in quiet, he could judge from the reply whether London believed his story that he had been forced to demonstrate an allegiance to the French in order to engineer a mutiny that would have freed Portugal, and that story sounded convincing to him, except that Portugal was being freed anyway. But all was not lost. It would be his word against Sharpe’s, and Christopher, whatever else he might be, was a gentleman and Sharpe was most decidedly not. There would be the delicate problem, of course, of what to do with Kate if he was called back to London, but he could probably deny that the marriage had ever taken place. He would put reports of it down to Kate’s vapors. Women were given to vapors, it was notorious. What had Shakespeare said? “Frailty, thy name is woman.” So he would truthfully claim that the gabbled service in Vila Real de Zedes’s small church was not a proper marriage and say that he had undergone it solely to save Kate’s blushes. It was a gamble, he knew, but he had played cards long enough to know that sometimes the most outrageous gambles paid the biggest winnings.

And if the gamble failed, and if he could not salvage his London
career then it probably would not matter, for he clung to the belief that the French would surely win in the end and he would be back in Oporto where, for lack of any other knowledge, the lawyers must account him as Kate’s husband and he would be wealthy. Kate would come to terms with it. She would recover when she was restored, as she would be, to comfort and home. Thus far, it was true, she had been unhappy, her joy at the marriage turning to horror in the bedroom, but young mares often rebelled against the bridle yet after a whipping or two became docile and obedient. And Christopher wished that outcome for Kate because her beauty still thrilled him. He dragged her on to where Williamson, now Christopher’s servant, held his horse. “Get on its back,” he ordered Kate.

“I want to go home!” she said.

“Get up!” He almost hit her with the riding crop that was tucked under the saddle, but then she meekly let him help her onto the horse. “Hold on to the reins, Williamson,” Christopher ordered. He did not want Kate turning the horse and kicking it away westward. “Hold them tight, man.”

“Yes, sir,” Williamson said. He was still in his rifleman’s uniform, though he had exchanged his shako for a wide-brimmed leather hat. He had picked up a French musket, a pistol and a saber in the retreat from Oporto and the weapons made him look formidable, an appearance that was a comfort to Christopher. The Colonel had needed a servant after his own had fled, but he wanted a bodyguard even more and Williamson played the role superbly. He told Christopher tales of tavern brawls, of wild fights with knives and clubs, of bare-fisted boxing bouts, and Christopher lapped it up almost as eagerly as he listened to Williamson’s bitter complaints about Sharpe.

In return Christopher had promised Williamson a golden future. “Learn French,” he had advised the deserter, “and you can join their army. Show that you’re good and they’ll give you a commission. They ain’t particular in the French army.”

“And if I wants to stay with you, sir?” Williamson had asked.

“I was always a man to reward loyalty, Williamson,” Christopher had
said, and so the two suited each other even if, for now, their fortunes were at a low ebb as, with thousands of other fugitives, they climbed into the rain, were buffeted by the wind and saw nothing ahead but the hunger, bleak slopes and wet rocks of the Serra de Santa Catalina.

Behind them, on the road from Oporto to Amarante, a sad trail of abandoned carriages and wagons stood in the downpour. The wounded French watched anxiously, praying that the pursuing British would appear before the peasants, but the peasants were closer than the redcoats, much closer, and soon their dark shapes were seen flitting in the rain and in their hands were bright knives.

And in the rain the wounded men’s muskets would not fire.

And so the screaming began.

S
HARPE WOULD
have liked to take Hagman on his pursuit of Christopher, but the old poacher was not fully recovered from his chest wound, and so Sharpe was forced to leave him behind. He took twelve men, his fittest and cleverest, and all complained vehemently when they were rousted out into Oporto’s rain before dawn because their bellies were sour with wine, their heads sore and their tempers short. “But not as short as mine,” Sharpe warned them, “so don’t make such a damned fuss.”

Hogan came with them, as did Lieutenant Vicente and three of his men. Vicente had learned that three mail carriages were going to Braga at first light and told Hogan that the vehicles were notoriously fast and would be traveling on a good road. The drivers, carrying sacks of mail that had been waiting for the French to leave before they could be delivered to Braga, happily made room for the soldiers who collapsed on the mail sacks and fell asleep.

They passed through the remnants of the city’s northern defenses in the wet halflight of dawn. The road was good, but the mail coaches were slowed because partisans had felled trees across the highway and each
barricade took a half-hour or more to clear. “If the French had known Amarante had fallen,” Hogan told Sharpe, “they’d have retreated on this road and we’d never have caught them! Mind you, we don’t know that their Braga garrison has left with the rest.”

It had, and the mail arrived along with a troop of British cavalry who were welcomed by cheering inhabitants whose joy could not be dampened by the rain. Hogan, in his engineer’s blue coat, was mistaken for a French prisoner and some horse dung was thrown at him before Vicente managed to persuade the crowd that Hogan was English.

“Irish,” Hogan protested, “please.”

“Same thing,” Vicente said absentmindedly.

“Good God in his heaven,” Harper said, disgusted, then laughed because the crowd insisted on carrying Hogan on their shoulders.

The main road from Braga went north across the frontier to Pontevedra, but to the east a dozen tracks climbed into the hills and one of them, Vicente promised, would take them all the way to Ponte Nova, but it was the same road that the French would be trying to reach and so he warned Sharpe that they might have to take to the trackless hills. “If we are lucky,” Vicente said, “we shall be at the bridge in two days.”

“And how long to the Saltador?” Hogan asked.

“Another half-day.”

“And how long will it take the French?”

“Three days,” Vicente said, “it must take them three days.” He made the sign of the cross. “I pray it takes them three days.”

They spent the night in Braga. A cobbler repaired their boots, insisting he would take no money, and he used his best leather to make new soles that were studded with nails to give some grip in the wet high ground. He must have worked all night for in the morning he shyly presented Sharpe with leather covers for the rifles and muskets. The weapons had been protected from the rain by corks shoved into their muzzles and by ragged clouts wrapped about the locks, but the leather sheaths were far better. The cobbler had greased the seams with sheep fat to make the covers waterproof and Sharpe, like his men, was absurdly pleased
with the gift. They were given so much food that they ended up giving most of it to a priest who promised to distribute it among the poor, and then, in the rain-lashed dawn, they marched. Hogan rode because the mayor of Braga had presented him with a mule, a sure-footed beast with a vile temper and a wall eye, which Hogan saddled with a blanket and then rode with his feet almost touching the ground. He suggested using the mule to carry their weapons, but of all the party he was the oldest and the least spry, and so Sharpe insisted he ride. “I’ve no idea what we’ll find,” Hogan told Sharpe as they climbed into the rock-strewn hills. “If the bridge at Ponte Nova has been blown, as it should have been by now, then the French will scatter. They’ll just be running for their lives and we’ll be hard put to find Mister Christopher in all that chaos. Still, we must try.”